On a January
evening in 1936, Joseph Stalin entered a box at the Bolshoi Theatre, in
Moscow.
His custom was to take a seat in the back, just before the curtain
rose. He had
become interested that month in new operas by Soviet composers: a week
earlier,
he had seen Ivan Dzerzhinsky's "The Quiet Don," and liked it enough
to summon the composer for a conversation. On this night, the Bolshoi
was
presenting "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," a dark, violent, sexually
explicit
opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. Stalin enjoyed himself less. After the
third
act-in which tsarist policemen are depicted as buffoons who arrest
people on
hastily fabricated pretexts-the Leader conspicuously walked out.
Shostakovich,
who had been expecting the same reception that Stalin gave to
Dzerzhinsky, went
away feeling, he said, "sick at heart." Two days later, Pravda
published an editorial under the headline "MUDDLE INNSTEAD OF MUSIC,"
which condemned Shostakovich's opera outright. "From the first
minute," the anonymous author wrote, "the listener is confused by a
deliberately
disordered, muddled stream of noise." The composer was playing a game
that
"may end very badly."

In 1936,
Shostakovich was twenty-nine years old, and he was the brilliant young
man of
Soviet music. His First Symphony, which he completed at the age of
eighteen,
had been taken up by orchestras around the world. He had dedicated
himself-industriously, if not enthusiastically-to works on Communist
themes.
His first opera, a setting of Gogol's "The Nose," typified the
impertinence
of art in the early Bolshevik years, and his second, "Lady Macbeth,"
was hailed-before Stalin saw it-as the prototypical Soviet music drama.
For the
benefit of the proletarian establishment, Shostakovich declared of his
opera,
"I wanted to unmask reality and to arouse a feeling of hatred for the
tyrannical
and humiliating atmosphere in a Russian merchant's household." At the
same
time, his satire of the police must have struck a sympathetic chord
with audiences
who were living under Stalin. It's impossible to say whether Stalin
himself
took offense at the police scene, or the graphic bedroom sequences, or
the
spasms of dissonance produced by the orchestra. Perhaps he simply felt,
with
his genius for destruction, that this young man needed a comeuppance.

Shostakovich
lived the next two years of his life in a state of abject fear.
Pravda's
denunciation of "Lady Macbeth" coincided with the beginning of the
Great Terror, and Shostakovich was immediately declared "an enemy of
the
people." He is said to have slept in the hallway outside his apartment,
so
that when the N.K.V.D. came to take him away his young family would not
have to
witness the scene. He finished his Fourth Symphony, a surreal, desolate
piece
in a Mahlerian vein, and withdrew it when cultural officials warned him
that he
was still on the wrong path. In April of 1937, he set to work on a new
symphony, in a simpler style; two months later, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a
Marshal
of the Soviet Union, who had been a supporter and friend of
Shostakovich's for
many years, was shot for his part in a nonexistent conspiracy. As the
N.K.V.D.
rounded up Tukhachevsky's circle, Shostakovich was called in for
questioning.
In an impeccably Gogolesque turn of events, the composer found that his
appointed interrogator had been arrested, and that no one else was
interested
in his case. When the Fifth Symphony had its premiere, in November of
1937, it
sent the audience into convulsions. During the third movement, the
proudly sorrowing
Largo, many broke into tears. During the finale, people around the hall
got to
their feet, as if royalty had entered the room. The ovation afterward
lasted
for forty minutes. The game had not ended badly, for the moment:
Shostakovich
had written a piece that had aroused the love of the masses, and he had
done so
in a clear style that passed muster with socialist-realist aesthetics.
The
Fifth went on to achieve enormous popularrity in the West.
Shostakovich, in the
remaining forty years of his career, proved to be one of the few
twentieth-century composers who could hold audiences in thrall, and
interest in
him has only intensified since his death. This season, in New York, he
is
everywhere: "Lady Macbeth" is currently playing at the Metropolitan
Opera; many of the symphonies have appeared on programs around town;
and the
Emerson Quartet has just recorded and performed the fifteen string
quartets.
Back in 1982, when the Fitzwilliam Quartet played the cycle at Alice
Tully
Hall, there were many empty seats. When the Emerson repeated the feat
last
month, the hall was full, and people were begging for tickets.

But
something funny has happened to this composer on his way to
immortality.
Audiences are listening to him more intently than ever, but they are
being
urged to listen in a very different way. Shostakovich, once pegged as a
propagandist
for the Soviet system, is now exalted as its noblest musical victim. He
has
been canonized as a moral subversive, a conscientious ironist, a "holy
fool"
The ending of the Fifth Symphony, which was once described as a paean
to
Stalin's Russia, is now described as a sub-rosa denunciation of it.
Such a hundred
and-eighty-degree rotation of meaning is curious, to say the least, and
the
arbitrariness of the change-the music is still said to represent Stalin
but,
now, critically-suggests that the new interpretation may be no more
valid than
the old one. The Fifth has become a hall of musical mirrors in which
our own unmusical
obsessions are reflected. The notes, in any case, remain the same. The
symphony
still ends fortissimo, in D major, and it still brings audiences to
their feet.

When I began
listening to Shostakovich, in college, I came across a record of a
Soviet radio
broadcast of one of the composer's public speeches. I put it on,
expecting to
meet the masterful personality behind the Fifth Symphony. Instead, I
heard a
man speaking hurriedly in Russian while an interpreter, sounding like a
voice-over man in a driver's-ed film, intoned such deathless phrases as
"We are all a vital part of the times we live in" and "Soviet
art rests foursquare on the ideas and principles proclaimed by the
great
Lenin." This was an introduction to the enigma of Shostakovich, who
made
an art of saying nothing memorable in public. After any performance of
his
music, he would declare, "Brilliantly done." When he was shown
something by another composer, he would say, "A remarkable work." He
mastered Soviet doublespeak, and artfully mocked it in his
correspondence:
"1944 is around the corner," he wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman.
"A year of happiness, joy, and victory. This year will bring us much
joy.
The freedom-loving Peoples will at long last throw off the yoke of
Hitlerism,
and peace will reign throughout the world under the sunny rays of
Stalin's
Constitution. I am convinced of this, and therefore experience the
greatest
joy."

This facade
was shattered in 1979, with the publication of "Testimony: The Memoirs
of
Dmitri Shostakovich, as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov."
Volkov,
a young Leningrad musicologist, had interviewed the composer in the
early
seventies and smuggled his manuscript out of the Soviet Union. In
"Testimony,"
Shostakovich rages against Stalin and offers provocative
reinterpretations of
several of his most familiar works. The book introduced many readers to
Shostakovich’s
biting wit, and they began to hear the same tone in his music. A
revisionist
school of interpretation developed, as critics went hunting for
subversive
messages in Shostakovich's ostensibly socialist-realist symphonies. The
quartets were likewise glossed as "private diaries" of the composer's
anguish under Soviet domination. It was in this light that the Emerson
played
the cycle; the program notes quoted from such great dissident figures
as Osip
Mandelstam, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Joseph Brodsky, implying that
Shostakovich belonged in their company. The Emerson also participated
in
"The Noise of Time," a production by the Theatre de Complicité, in
which Shostakovich’s music under-scored a multimedia collage of his
tormented
life.

Not everyone
has bought into this outspoken posthumous dissidence. A year after
"Testimony"
appeared, an American scholar, Laurel Fay, wrote an article questioning
the
book's authenticity. A second camp was formed-one that declared that
Shostakovich
had never strayed too far from the Party line, and that to call him a
"dissident"
made a mockery of the term. The musicologist Richard Taruskin declared
that
several of Shostakovich’s major works conformed all too well with
Soviet
ideology. In his book "Defining Russia Musically," he wrote that the
satire of the merchant class in "Lady Macbeth" coincided chillingly
with Stalin's murderous campaign against the kulaks. Fay recently
published
"Shostakovich: A Life" (Oxford), which paints the composer as a
fearful, accommodating figure.

In the last
few years, the war for the mind of Shostakovich has only escalated.
Polemics
and counter-polemics are flying over the transom. Allan Ho and Dmitry
Feofanov,
two Volkov admirers, have responded to Fay's attacks on "Testimony"
with a seven-and-eighty-seven-page volume entitled "Shostakovich
Reconsidered," and buried in it is a good case for the memoir's
authenticity.
The authors observe, for example, that the composer's signature appears
on the
first page of the Vollkov manuscript, on which it is written, "Looking
back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses."
Shostakovich,
therefore, could have been under no illusions about the kind of project
he was
engaged in. Unfortunately, "Shostakovich Reconsidered" is a pedantic,
fanatical mess of a book, a kind of hardbound Web site, in which fresh
information
is lost in reams of third-hand factoids and musicological daydreaming.
All
participants in the debate, in fact, have graphomaniac tendencies. Ian
MacDonald, another critic of the revisionist persuasion, has posted a
fifty-thousand-word
review of Fay's biography on the Internet. Fay is preparing a response
to
"Shostakovich Reconsidered"-an article about a book about an article
about a book. "Muddle Instead of Music" would be a good title for an
omnibus anthology of the whole affair.

Here is a
possible compromise: "Testimony" does tell us what Shostakovich was
thinking
about at the end of his life, but Shostakovich at the end of his life
was a
desperately embittered man, whose pronouncements on his own work are
not always
to be trusted. "Testimony," in other words, may be authentic, but it
may not always tell the truth. By the early seventies, when Volkov
conducted
his interviews, Shostakovich was wracked by illness and clouded by
medication.
He had acquired a poor reputation among those who were trying to resist
the
excesses of the Soviet regime, and, in 1973, he enraged the dissident
community
further by signing a letter of denunciation against Andrey Sakharov.
The composer
may have wished to improve his image in the eyes of the younger
generation, of
whom Volkov was a representative. So he went back over his published
work and
argued that what had seemed doctrinaire was in fact subversive. This is
what he
said of the Fifth Symphony:

I
think that it is clear to everyone what happens
in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in
"Boris
Godunov." It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying,
"Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing," and you
rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, "Our business is
rejoicing,
our business is rejoicing." What kind of apotheosis is that? You have
to
be a complete oaf not to hear that.

It is
strange for an artist to hector his audience in this fashion.
Shostakovich was
usually as vague as possible when he spoke about his music, and his
belated,
belligerent specificity about the meaning of the Fifth seems to protest
too
much. Nothing in the score supports such a reading. And even if the
composer
had wanted a sardonic ending, attempts to perform it sardonically have
proved unconvincing.
A hundred orchestral musicians cannot play their hearts out in a major
key and
sound insincere about what they are doing.

Shostakovich's
revisionist account of the Fifth has caught on because the
circumstances of its
creation make us uncomfortable. It's hard to accept that a composer
wrote his
best-loved work under the gun of a totalitarian regime. Listening to
the Fourth
and Fifth Symphonies side by side-one sprawling, dissonant, and spooky;
the
other strict, conservative, and uplifting-leaves no doubt that in 1936
and 1937
Shostakovich did make an abrupt and partly involuntary stylistic
swerve. Yet most
of us prefer the straitjacketed Fifth to the wildly gesticulating
Fourth. Most
of us, like it or not, share Stalin's taste for the tonal and the
tuneful. The
revisionist interpretation, conveniently, gives us the luxury of
listening on
two levels-the intellectual and the emotional. First, we ponder the
theory that
Shostakovich set out to write a meretricious grand finale, hedging it
in with
ironies and ambiguities. Then we connect emotionally with the unironic,
unambiguous power of the sound. We nod our heads sagely at the program
notes,
and sway in our seats to the thudding of the drums. If we are inspired,
we can
jump to our feet at the end-sardonically, of course.

This raises
a question about the famous premiere in 1937, at which people stood up
in awe
while the music was still playing. If, as the revisionists claim, all
good
Russians understood the coded message "Your business is rejoicing,"
why didn't they remain seated? More likely, they were getting to their
feet because
the music was rejoicing, in spite of everything-proudly, darkly,
improbably.
Shostakovich deployed an arsenal of pre-existing musical devices to
give his
finale maximum impact. He looked back, in particular, to the
transcendent
finale of Mahler's Third Symphony, which is as cosmically free of irony
as
anything ever written. Mahler's coda is in the same key as
Shostakovich's, and
it has the same repetition of triads, the same device of timpani
repeatedly
pounding a two-note figure (D and A), even the same touches in the
orchestration
(trumpets piercing the general mass of sound). It's telling that
conductors
slow the drumbeat in the last three bars of the Fifth, in defiance of
Shostakovich’s
score but in accordance with Mahler's-they are getting the two
symphonies
confused. This is not to say that Shostakovich's ending is an
altogether happy
one. By adding a fiercely pulsating A in the strings and the winds, he
gives
his celebration a seething edge. But it is a celebration all the same.

Evidence for
the ultimately triumphal character of the Fifth crops up in, of all
places,
"Shostakovich Reconsidered." That book excerpts some lectures by
Maxim Shostakovich, the composer's son, who has long been an
authoritative
conductor of the symphonies. "The Fifth Symphony is his 'Heroic'
Symphony," Maxim writes. He quotes his father as follows: "The hero
is saying, 'I am right. I will follow the way I choose.' " The
interpretation that Shostakovich offered his son contradicted what he
told
Volkov-the ending, he implied, was sincere and in his own voice. The
symphony,
in other words, is the conventional Romantic story of an individual
overcoming
adversity. That Soviet propagandists co-opted it as a glorification of
Stalin
shouldn't stop us from hearing glory of a different kind. The hero of
this
symphony has the freedom to imagine joy, if not to experience it. Call
it an
angry joy-a lunge for a better world.

The Fifth
Symphony is a statement of awesome confidence, but it emerged from
conditions
of fear. During the remainder of Shostakovich's career, fear took its
toll. The
success of the Fifth, and the even greater wartime success of the
Seventh
Symphony, the "Leningrad," made the composer a potent propaganda
resource for the Soviets, and he began to feel trapped in his position.
After
the war, he failed to produce the Beethovenian "Victory" symphony
that Stalin had been expecting, issuing instead a largely frivolous
Ninth
Symphony with a vaudeville finale. A second campaign against formalism
erupted
in 1948, and Shostakovich suffered another sickening fall from grace. A
new
trend emerged in his dealings with the regime: instead of lying low, as
he had
done after the "Lady Macbeth" crisis, he went out of his way to
humble himself in public. At the 1948 proceedings against formalism,
during
which most of the accused composers avoided personal appearances, he
read aloud
a speech that was stultifying in its banality and disconcerting in its
masochism. He later claimed that the text of this speech had been
forced on
him, but other participants in the affair were apparently able to speak
in
their own voice. Prokofiev, for one, sent in a reply that was prickly
and condescending
in tone.

Shostakovich
suffered under the Soviet system, but so did many other people. After a
point,
the fact of oppression fails to justify his actions. During the
Khrushchev
thaw, he became, if anything, more deeply implicated in the Communist
hierarchy. He recited every speech that was put in front of him, he
signed
manifestos and denunciations without reading them. In 1960, he joined
the
Party, an unnecessary action, for which he gave conflicting
explanations (one
being that he was drunk). There were elements of defeatism in his
philosophy.
"Don't create illusions," he would tell his colleagues. "There's
no other life. There can’t be any." The text of "Testimony" is
laced with hopelessness: life is miserable, it says, nothing can
change, one
must grow hard, death waits at the end. Shostakovich condemns two
"patented saviors," two men of "false religiosity," who
thought they could save the world. They are, incredibly, Stalin and
Solzhenitsyn.

In the late
sixties and early seventies, Shostakovich did write many works in which
resistance to authority was a running theme: the texts of his vocal
works spoke
of poets murdered by tsars, rebels dancing on the scaffold, exiles
expressing
the conscience of a country. In his Fourteenth Symphony, he set a poem
by
Apollinaire entitled "The Zaporozhian Cossacks' Answer to the Sultan of
Constantinople,"
in which the "evil butcher of Podolye" is denounced in tones distinctly
reminiscent of the Scherzo from the Tenth Symphony-the piece that
"Testimony" calls a "portrait of Stalin." But such music
was more the projection of a dissident career than the enactment of
one. It
offered no hope for action and change. For genuine dissidents, such as
Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, Shostakovich was part of the problem. In an
interview, ironically, with Solomon Volkov, Brodsky attacked the effort
to
locate "nuances of virtue" in the gray expanses of Shostakovich's
later life. Such a career of compromise, Brodsky said, destroys a man
instead
of preserving him. "It transforms the individual into ruins," he
said. "The roof is gone, but the chimney, for example, might still be
standing."

Ruins,
however, can be beautiful to behold. Shostakovich was never able or
willing to
write another convincingly "heroic" symphony, but he found other
avenues of expression, most significantly in chamber music. He wrote
his first
string quartet in 1938, in the wake of the Fifth Symphony, and the
quartet
medium became for him a refuge from the anxiety of symphonic public
speaking.
In the new realm, he could explore the technical limits of his musical
language,
which is based on an intricate array of Russian modal scales, and also
test the
psychological limits of his narratives, in which seemingly simple and
innocent
ideas are revealed as their opposites. A banal melody is often heard
over a
changing and blackening array of accompaniments, so that its meaning is
altered
and destroyed; in the same way, a plain chord twists around and falls
apart as
long lines of eighth notes snake through it. Shostakovich is a master
manipulator
of mood: he can show panicky happiness slipping into inchoate rage, and
then
crumbling into lethargic despair. In the hands of the Emerson Quartet,
which
played with unprecedented brilliance, the quartets seemed, even more
than the
symphonies, a complete emotional world.

The Emerson
ended its series with a recital of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Quartets.
These works have a pared-down, thinned-out quality, as if a gust of
wind had
blown random pages off the musicians' stands. When the quartet played
the
Fifteenth again, as part of Theatre de Complicite's "The Noise of
Time," the piece acquired a positively unreal and deathly aura: the
members
of the ensemble wandered about the stage, with silent figures shadowing
and
mimicking them. The Emerson’s performance, staggering as it was, may
have made
too much of the obvious gloom of the Fifteenth, which, like so much of
Shostakovich's later work, also has its share of quotations, quirks,
and
private jokes. The vacant tread of the opening, in the muted,
claustrophobic
key of E-flat minor, is descended from the Andante of Beethoven's
Seventh
Symphony, while the second theme, in open-air C major, brings to mind
the lofty
first theme of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. Such out-of-nowhere
quotations in
late Shostakovich produce a feeling of free-floating movement and deep
musical
space. Even as it comes to the end of the line, the music begins all
over
again, with the basic building blocks of tradition. Shostakovich's
career was a
spectacular one, mixing scenes of triumph and terror. But it is not
enough to
match up the events of the life with the events of the music, because
the music
is still more triumphant and more terrifying. You can hear the agony,
and you
can think about the agony in Shostakovich's life, but Shostakovich
wrote
agonized music from the beginning to the end of his career, no matter
who was
running the country. Russian composers long ago perfected techniques of
agony, formulas
of lamentation. Tchaikovsky's musical suffering led biographers to
emphasize
the suffering in his life, and, when the biography was exhausted,
enthusiasts
embraced a spurious rumor that the composer had committed suicide.
Something
similar has happened with Shostakovich. The strong feeling in his music
has led
people to imagine a man who was engaged in a great battle with the
system. But
the hard facts reveal a smaller, weaker figure-a man who strived at all
costs
to create conditions in which he could work in peace.

Perhaps the
most revealing observation Shostakovich ever made about himself came in
a
letter to his favorite pupil, Boris Tishchenko, less than two years
before his
death. He told Tishchenko that he had been thinking about Chekhov’s
story
"Ward 6," the tale of a doctor who halfheartedly performs his duties
at a squalid provincial hospital. "When I read in that story about
Andrey
Yefimovich Ragin," Shostakovich wrote, "it seems to me I am reading
memoirs about myself". This was a strange comment, since he was at that
moment engaged in dictating his memoirs to Volkov. But certain passages
of
"Ward 6" eerily illuminate the rants of "Testimony":

Dr. Ragin
was a great believer in intelligence and honesty, but he lacked the
strength of
character and the confidence in his own right to assert himself in
order to see
to it that the life around him should be honest and intelligent. He
simply did
not know how to give orders, to prohibit, or to insist. It was almost
as though
he had taken a vow never to raise his voice .... When deceived or
flattered or
handed a quite obviously fraudulent account for signature, he turned as
red as
a lobster and felt guilty, but he signed the account all the same.

Late at
night, Ragin broods over his condition: "I am serving a bad cause, and
I
receive a salary from people whom I deceive. I am dishonest. But then I
am
nothing by myself, I am only a small part of a necessary social evil
.... It is
the fault of the time I live in." He finds solace in the thought that
suffering is universal and that death destroys all human aspirations in
the
end. Immortality, he says, is a fiction. When he dies, of a sudden
stroke, he
is mourned by no one. At that point, the resemblance to Shostakovich
breaks
down.+